Printer needs trade show banner in 120 dpi. How to set?

[keithm1972]

In Photoshop I can easily set the image resolution to whatever I want. I started some graphics there, but now I want to do some layout stuff that's a little easier in InDesign. The printer asked for the submitted file to be in 120 dpi, but I'm not seeing a place to handle that.

Any experience on this or similar workflows you can share? Thanks.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

What format do they want the print file in? I assume PDF...

If your layout is entire InDesign elements (all vector/font based), the resolution of the PDF will be moot.

If you have raster image content, it should be sized to 120ppi for the effective print size (that is, if a logo needs to be 20 inches across, it should be 2400 pixels across in the layout).

Larger images are okay, too; if the logo is 3600 or 4800 pixels across, it's not a problem.

When you export the PDF, set the resolution to 120dpi/ppi for all image types.

It's unlikely, but check if the printer has a specific color profile you should use, and whether the PDF should be RGB (probably) or CMYK. They really should have a complete file spec page somewhere for these details, but LF printers... well.

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[Peter Spier]

>> When you export the PDF, set the resolution to 120dpi/ppi for all image types.

That's presuming you've designed at 100% scale. For a large banner you may have to do the layout at half-size or smaller and let the printer scale it up. If that's the case, you would need the resolution to be higher by the same scale factor.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

All true. It's always a tradeoff doing large format stuff. Of course, a lot of older software couldn't go past 40-50 inch dimensions, so it was necessary then.

I long used 1 pica = 1 in just to keep the numbers reasonable, but then you have to think about scaling any non-vector elements. I haven't done any LF recently but I'm pretty sure the last rounds were all at 1:1 just for simplicity. I don't think it affects either INDD or PDF file size, all things considered.

But it's often weird working in dozens or hundreds of inches and multi-thousand-pixel logo images and such if you do page layout most of the time. 🙂

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